From Chapter 1, “A Place to Come Home To,” by Marj Casswell (go here to buy the book) For years every pack of cigarettes I opened took me back to our tobacco barn. As the red plastic encircling the pack tore away and the silver paper lifted, I would stand under two-foot long leaves drying…
Marj Casswell’s first published novel, “A Place to Come Home to” was a semifinalist for both the William Faulkner/Wisdom Competition, and the Lewis and Clark Expedition Award. Vancouver’s Casswell is generally known as a non-fiction writer and wrote for non-profit organizations before starting her second career as novelist. Today Riehlife interviews Marj who writes feelingly…
Today read my review of Marj’s book. Tomorrow read our interview in which Marj shares her thoughts and connections to farming, family, and the land. Saturday, read an excerpt from the beginning of “A Place to Come Home To.”
Humans, even nomads, are settlers at heart. We want a place to come home to, a hearth to warm our hands around, and other humans to love us. Marj Casswell in “A Place to Come Home To” tells a story of these ordinary yearnings and the high price they exact from us. In the opening…
It was a long Harry Potter Weekend, even out here in the Midwest. On Friday I read about the pirating of “Deathly Halllows” and Scholastic’s countermeasures in the Wall Street Journal as I sat down for a “Fish in a Boat” lunch at a bohemian cafe near the City Museum where I’d gone to watch…
There’s a new review of my father Erwin A. Thompson’s “Cattle Country and Back Trail: Two Tales from the Thompson Western Series” on Book Pleasures Among other comments, the reviewer Ernest Dempsey says: “Cattle Country and Back Trail is an exciting reading of the values that characterized the heroes of the not-so-remote past. Foremost, these…
Velda Brotherton, originally from Winslow, Arkansas has been writing fiction and non fiction for 20 years. She studied her craft through workshops and mentored by other writers. Velda is a little like my father, in that the formal education for both ended at high school graduation–in a day when that was solid schooling. Both have…
Suzanne Woods Fisher, member of Women Writing the West, shares a few thoughts on the release of her new book, Copper Star (see link below). Copper Star is a World War II love story set in 1943, as theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer smuggles a young resistance worker, Louisa, out of Nazi Germany. Louisa waits out the…
I chose this excerpt because I feel it shows Ernest Dempsey’s ability to play with ideas. This is only the first page of his short satire, “Imaginative.” –JGR _____________________________________________ Late in the night, Muria heard some unusual noise in the kitchen while taking the only dustbin to the opposite corner of the living room for…
“Humor is peace in the true sense of the word,” says Ernest Dempsey in Part II of our Riehlife conversation as our thoughts roam over such topics as the important influence of his brother and how Pakistani culture views writing/writers.–JGR JGR: I know you’ve been working on your first book, “The Biting Age” for five…